Kostya is the first into the voice channel and the last out of it, and nobody thanks him for it: people stopped noticing that at roughly the same time they stopped noticing that the room has a floor.
He is not the best player in this raid. He is not even in the top ten. A healing druid, a careful middle-of-the-road one: he never falls apart, but he never surprises anyone either. What he does have is a notebook — paper, with a dog-eared corner — and what he writes in it is not timers and not rotations, but other things. Who takes offence at being moved to a different subgroup. Who asked not to be called for the first attempt, because on the first attempt he always misses and then says nothing for the rest of the evening.
Lists
On Thursday twenty-five showed up. A full roster on a Thursday is an event in itself, but nobody treats it as one: Sindragosa is ahead, and everyone is thinking about the mark and the ice tombs, not about the fact that twenty-five other people's schedules have miraculously lined up here.
The first three attempts went exactly the way first three attempts go. On the fourth things moved: the dragon went airborne almost on the timer, the tombs were broken fast, the stacks stayed within reason. And then on the ground the raid came apart in nine seconds — as simply and as annoyingly as a stack of plates comes apart.
The channel went quiet with that particular kind of quiet in which you can already hear somebody reaching for the leave button.
— Right, — said Kostya. — Five minutes. Actually five, I have set a timer.
The break
He got a lot done in those five minutes.
He messaged the healer who had been too slow with the big shield — not "you were too slow", but "listen, did you even have a window to press it? I think I put you in the wrong place". The answer came a minute later: "I did, I just brainfarted". That was work too. A person who says "I brainfarted" of their own accord does not leave the raid. The one who leaves is the one who gets told it.
Then Kostya exchanged a couple of words with the tank who had been struggling for the second month running. He did not go over the numbers, he asked about the move. The tank started telling him about the removal men and cut himself off halfway through:
— All right, I see where I am turning around more than I need to.
Then for thirty seconds he shared his screen and silently dragged the cursor across the floor of the hall: this is where we are standing, and it needs to be like this, wider. Just a bigger circle.
And only after that did he deal with the one person who had already typed "well, there it is, classic" into chat — the phrase that kills raids more reliably than any boss.
— You are right, — Kostya said in the main channel. — Classic. We went through this in Ulduar and we came out of it. Again?
Nobody found anything to argue with. It is awkward to argue with agreement.
What is not in the tactics
After that came four more attempts, and every one of them was worse than the fourth. By half past midnight it was finally clear that tonight was not happening.
Somebody else would have squeezed out two more pulls on sheer willpower. Kostya looked at the time and said:
— Stop. Two words of review, and then bed.
The review took two minutes, and not a single name came up in it. We are standing too tightly because we are afraid we will not make it in time; we will stand wider and we will make it. The fourth attempt was a good one, and it should be remembered as a good one rather than a painful one.
He left last, when there was nobody in the channel but somebody's forgotten open microphone with a wall clock ticking in it.
In the notebook, against that evening, he wrote one word: "holding".
A week later
The following Thursday twenty-five came. The same twenty-five. The healer who had brainfarted joined the channel ten minutes early and waited quietly by the entrance. The tank wrote that the move was over and his internet was fit for humans now.
They did not kill Sindragosa that evening either — they got her to two percent and went down, and that hurt far more than nine seconds had a week earlier. But in the morning nobody in the guild chat was working out whose fault it was. Somebody posted a screenshot of the health bar with those two percent on it and captioned it: "Thursday we finish her". And everybody agreed, because on Thursday they will gather again: twenty-five people with jobs, children, house moves and conference calls — and one middling druid with a paper notebook.
On guilds and raids — the guilds and raids section. Where a character begins — the getting started page.
